Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Are you mad? What if anyone recognized me?”

“They’d send you an e-mail and ask how you’ve been, and you’d answer and that’s the last you’d hear from them. Internet reunions are fleeting and they tire fast. I’m serious. Do it.”

“I’d sooner die.”

Fourteen

“ When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

— George W. Bush, Iowa Western Community College, January 21, 2000

Sugit Suttirat, ex-minister of the environment, parked his cliche red Corvette opposite the Olympuss in the space saved for him with two plastic shower stools. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror.

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

Some might suggest it was his standing in society that made him so popular with the girls, but he knew there were those among them that found themselves uncontrollably turned on by his looks. They’d told him so, even after he’d handed over the money. Women were easy to read. He beeped the central lock and watched as his lights blinked him goodnight. They’d see him again at two or three, drunk as a porpoise on diesel fumes, sexually satisfied and satisfying sexually thanks to Ovariga. Ovariga was produced and packaged in Yunan, China, and every bit as potent as Viagra. He’d wake up the next morning and it would still be there. Sometimes he had to sit through two meetings with his notes covering his lap. Excellent stuff.

He started across the street. The Olympuss lights were beckoning in red and silver. The girls sat out front on a bench, watching traffic, their little skirts climbing up their thighs, their faces…well, who really cared if they had faces? He stood on the white line to let a slow-moving Milo chocolate milk van pass by but it slowed even more, then stopped in the middle of the road. He was expecting the driver to wind down the window and ask directions but the glass was dark and he saw no one inside. He cursed and walked behind the van. The left rear door was flung open suddenly and it smashed into his face. He heard his reconstructed nose snap and felt the blood flow over his lips.

“What the…?”

I remember that Sunday in a blur, manure flying in every direction as if a ceiling fan had fallen into a tub of chocolate mousse. It began at six a.m. with a call from Sissi.

“Jimm, I’ve got one,” she said.

I was still fuzzy from the Romanian wine. I took my cell phone out to the veranda and squeaked down on one of the rattan chairs.

“Since when did you get up before sunrise?” I asked her.

“Never,” she said. “I haven’t been to bed. I’ve had rather a heavy night with the police.”

“You in trouble?”

“Not the real police, fool. The Police Beat police. They’re really bullies online too, let me tell you. I have bruises.”

“I believe you.”

I looked down at the beach and saw a shadowy figure trudging along the sand.

“And I found you a hat,” she said. “An orange one.”

“OK, thanks. Mail it down.”

“Look, will you slap yourself in the face or something? You’re always educationally challenged when you first wake up. I’m talking about a case. An unsolved murder.”

“All right. And it’s a stabbing?”

“No.”

“Victim have religious connections?”

“No.”

The little enthusiasm I’d managed to rouse was on its way back to bed.

“Thailand?”

“Guam.”

If you’d handed me a map and offered me a million baht I couldn’t have told you where Guam was. Neither could I give a lizard’s back end.

“So, the connection is an orange hat?”

“Do you think you can downgrade a little of that cynicism? I’ve been up all night looking for this frigging hat.”

I’d unlocked the beast so it was the least I could do to hear her out.

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“Toshi.”

“Bless you.”

“My Japanese detective. A judo black belt. Olympic medal and very fond of Eastern European women.”

How sweet. Two nonexistent people had found one another.

“He replied to my search ‘unsolved murder — incongruous hat’. His English was crap but he made up for it with his enthusiasm. He said this was the case that had most baffled him. A Japanese engineering firm was in Guam building a two-million-yen hotel.”

“Which is about fifty dollars.”

“All right, I don’t know, two-hundred billion yen — a very expensive hotel, twenty story, designed by a famous architect. One of the Japanese foremen supervising the local workers falls from the top of the almost complete hotel into the empty swimming pool. An accident, they all assume, until the coroner discovers a small-gauge bullet hole in his lower back.”

I was growing impatient. The figure on the beach was clearly my mother in her ninja costume.

“Does the incongruous hat arrive soon?” I asked.

“That was the confusing thing. Something nobody could explain. You know the Japs and their look-alike costumes. The firm that undertook the construction had their own very distinct uniforms: luminous green full-body overalls and white hard hats. No fashion statements. No individual touches. They were Japanese and they’d all arrived on the bus together that morning. But when the foreman hit the pool, he was wearing a bright orange hard hat. And do you know why?”

“Rebellion?”

“Somebody had spray painted his hat luminous orange while he was still wearing it.”

“He didn’t do it himself?”

“The paint was in his eyes, around his neck. There was no sign of a can. Whoever sprayed him took it with them. And they never found the shooter.”

It was weird and it was irrelevant and I was distressed to have been woken up so early and forced to listen to it.

“That’s great, Siss. Thanks.”

“You don’t sound very excited.”

“No, I am. Tired, that’s all. Let’s keep pushing on the orange hat thing. Good job. Listen, everyone’s growling here for breakfast. I’m going to have to leave you. Talk to you later.”

Bad start to the day: hangover, long stupid phone call, mother up to no good. It could only get better.

It didn’t.

Sitting in front of the kitchen block was a little man on a very old motorcycle. He weighed so little I imagined